The EconomistAugust 8th 2020 Britain 43W
alter bagehot, a Victorian editor of The Economist, cele-
brated the House of Lords as the more dignified of the two
Parliamentary chambers. “Dignified” is hardly the word for the
bumper bucket of new peers—36 in all—that Boris Johnson has
just created. The list includes the son of a Russian kgb-agent-
turned-oligarch who owns a couple of newspapers in Britain and a
party castle in Italy; an ageing, irascible cricketer who supported
Brexit; a former Revolutionary Communist Party activist and ira
apologist who also supported Brexit (the balm that washes away all
sins); the prime minister’s brother; and sundry party donors, bag-
carriers and hangers-on. This from a government that acknowl-
edges the Lords is absurdly bloated, now with over 800 peers.
The few people who have defended Mr Johnson’s list have done
so on the grounds that it was ever thus. Every prime minister
comes into office promising to reform the Lords only to end up
treating it as a patronage pissoir. In 2007, in what was dubbed the
“cash for honours” scandal, the Parliamentary Standards Author-
ity rejected seven of Tony Blair’s nominees. Harold Wilson’s resig-
nation honours list in 1976, drawn up on lavender-coloured note-
paper by Marcia Falkender, his private secretary and special friend,
contained the name of several fraudsters.
Leave aside that this argument belongs in a banana republic.
Leave aside, too, that the Lords has lighter financial disclosure
rules than the Commons because peers are supposed paragons of
probity. The argument ignores the context in which the list ap-
pears. Mr Johnson’s degradation of the Upper House is happening
as the rules of public life are under unprecedented strain.
In the 18th and early 19th centuries the British political system
was known as “Old Corruption”. The rich treated the state as their
private property, appointing their cronies to “pocket boroughs”,
securing jobs in the civil service for the fool of the family and buy-
ing great offices of state for themselves. The Victorians dismantled
this system in the name of open competition and public duty, con-
scious that Britain couldn’t succeed as a great industrial power if it
was hampered by an inefficient state.
Mr Johnson’s list suggests that the country is reverting to old
habits. This is not about money changing hands in brown paper
bags—British politics is still cleaner than in France or Italy—buttreatinggovernment,ifnot quite with contempt, then as nothing
more than a means to personal or ideological ends. The sense of
high seriousness that the Victorians attached to government is be-
ing eroded before the public’s gaze, as insiders cash in on their
knowledge and experience, ideologues bend the rules to push nar-
row agendas, and the likes of Evgeny (now Lord) Lebedev dole out
jobs and party invitations to members of the political class.
The erosion of standards is encouraged by structural changes
in political life. The collapse of party membership is forcing par-
ties to take desperate measures to raise money. This is particularly
true of the Conservatives who, with only 150,000 members, have
resorted to auctioning places next to senior ministers at fund-rais-
ing dinners. One such dinner recently resulted in scandal: Richard
Desmond, a property developer and former pornographer, took
the opportunity to show his dining companion, Robert Jenrick,
the housing secretary, a video of his £1bn property development in
East London. He eventually persuaded Mr Jenrick to overrule his
own department to grant permission for it.
The shortening of political careers means that young stars are
always thinking of their next move. George Osborne, only 45 when
he ceased to be chancellor, quickly built a new career by persuad-
ing Blackrock to pay him more than £650,000 to offer advice one
day a week and Mr Lebdevev to make him editor of the Evening
Standard. At the same time, the internet has blown apart funding
rules. A new book by Peter Geoghegan, “Democracy for Sale”, docu-
ments the ways in which politics is being transformed by invisible
donors who try to influence it through “dark money”, internet wiz-
ards who delight in exploiting legal loopholes and spies who use
bots and shell organisations to muddy the waters.
Still, Brexit acclerated the decline, eroding the legitimacy of the
state and reducing its competence. Brexiteers launched a fusillade
against any institution that got in their way, including the Su-
preme Court and the Lords. Political entrepreneurs could exploit
the confusion to insert themselves into the heart of policy-mak-
ing. Shanker Singham, the “brains of Brexit”, became the country’s
most influential adviser on trade despite having no formal qualifi-
cations in economics and spending most of his career as a lawyer-
lobbyist in America. Finally, Mr Johnson and his coterie of hard-
liners seized control of the Conservative Party.
Mr Johnson is a specialist in not taking anything too seriously.
In her new book, “The Twilight of Democracy”, Anne Applebaum
describes the atmosphere at the Spectator magazine in the
mid-1990s, when she worked there alongside Mr Johnson (who lat-
er edited it): “the tone of every conversation, every editorial meet-
ing, was arch, every professional conversation amusing; there was
no moment when the joke ended or the irony ceased.” Mr Johnson
is surrounded (some would say captured) by revolutionaries who
believe in tearing down the current order. Dominic Cummings, Mr
Johnson’s most important adviser, is a libertarian revolutionary
who reveres technology and creative destruction. Michael Gove,
the cabinet-office minister, has a neuralgic dislike of the “clerisy”
that runs the establishment.
The combination of languid indifference to “boring institu-
tions” and revolutionary fervour would be dangerous at any time.
It is poisonous when public standards are being eroded by new
technology and changing norms. The Victorians knew that Old
Corruption would inevitably return unless you waged a relentless
war on behalf of clean government and public probity. There is no
sign that Britain’s current masters have either the firmness of pur-
pose or philosophical conviction to wage such a war. 7Bagehot The smell of rot
Boris Johnson’s new list of peers reveals a dangerous contempt for governing institutions